Articles about Storage

EMC and VMware confirmed that Paul Maritz is leaving his position as CEO of VMware late Tuesday, transitioning to chief strategist within parent company EMC. As first reported by CRN Monday, and confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, Pat Gelsinger will move from his current role as EMC President and COO of Information Infrastructure Products to CEO of VMware. Both appointments take effect September 1.

EMC acquired VMware in 2004. Insiders say that while the two companies initially stated their respective management teams would stay separate, many expected an eventual blurring of those lines and a shuffling of executives between the two companies. Maritz has been with EMC since 2008, and Gelsinger joined a year later.

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Almost every software update that gets released, particularly those that involve only minor version number increases, addresses bugs that have been found and performance issues. This is the case with the latest release of Microsoft’s cloud storage app SkyDrive but there is also a little more to be found in this seemingly minor update (16.4.6003). Perhaps the most immediately obvious change is the new logo which is very much in keeping with the look and feel of Windows 8.

The imminent release of Windows 8 means that improve support for this new operating system was to be expected. The new logo mimics the look of the Windows 8 logo -- albeit in a more rounded form -- and the update is due to roll out to other platforms in the coming weeks to give a more uniform look to the service. But there is more to the latest release than a new logo.

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It’s no secret that running regular backups should be an essential part of every PC owner’s routine. But most people don’t bother, not least because setting this up on their own system can be such a lengthy and tedious business.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Genie Timeline Professional 2012 takes a far simpler approach than most file-based backup tools, keeping configuration issues to an absolute minimum, and generally doing a great job of staying out of your way.

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Data security is of the utmost importance, but it is usually the files stored on our hard drives or transmitted over the Internet that we are primarily concerned with. It’s likely that you have at least one USB drive that you use o move files from one computer to another, perhaps transporting files between home and office. If you were to lose the drive, there is not only the irritation of not having access to the files you need, there is also the concern that whomever finds the drive will be able to vie your private data -- this is something that USB Safeguard can help with.

As you’ve probably guessed from the name and the scenario we have set up, this is a program that can be used to protect the files you have chosen to store on a USB drive. This is a tiny portable app, weighing in at less than 100KB, but it is none the less powerful. While there is a paid version of the app available that can be used to protect drives of up to 16TB in size, there is also a free version that can be used on drives up to 2GB.

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Paragon Software has released Drive Backup 11 ($95.95 for Workstation), the latest edition of its business-oriented tool. And the headline improvement this time is new sector-level incremental disk imaging, which, Paragon says, has boosted the efficiency of this backup type by 200%.

Elsewhere, file-based backups can now be encrypted by a password. There’s the option to back up your data to an FTP/ SFTP server. Support for working with virtual disks has now been improved, and new asynchronous data transfer means backup performance has considerably improved.

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File synchronization services like Dropbox have really taken off in recent time. They basically allow you to sync files between devices using cloud storage as buffer. Depending on the service, you get web access, document editing options, photo galleries, media streaming and more on top of that.

All services have in common that they encrypt the connection between your computer and the cloud host to protect the data from third parties that try to intercept or record what is being transferred. Each service has implemented its own scheme, and it is often difficult and sometimes even impossible to find out how the data is protected by the service.

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Online backup services have traditionally been all about storing files from lots of users in a single, large data centre. Which is fine, but can be expensive, as there’s a lot of costly infrastructure to maintain.

Symform takes a more distributed approach, spreading its data around the hard drives of other Symform users. And with that meaning the service is more about managing this distribution than the data itself, the company can offer you up to 200GB of cloud storage space at no cost at all.

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Most free recovery tools focus on undeleting files only. As its name suggests, though, Eassos PartitionGuru Free goes a little further: the program can recover anything from individual files to entire partitions, and it has a few other useful features thrown in, too.

That’s the theory, at least. In practice the free edition of the program is a little restricted, and can’t recover data on USB keys, GPT disks, or regular drives which don’t use 512-byte sectors. If that’s not going to affect you, though, PartitionGuru does otherwise have some interesting functionality which you might find very useful.

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Amazon Cloud Player, a service that lets Amazon users stream their cloud-stored music collection to their mobile device over a regular data connection, has been available on Android for more than a year. Tuesday, Amazon finally released the iPhone and iPod touch version of the Cloud Player App.

Just like the Android version, users can stream their music, download songs, or manage their music in the cloud, with the included ability to share playlists created in iTunes with the user's cloud library.

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In the crowd of hungry tired worn-out journalists at the Showstoppers Tech and Gadget showcase event at the Icon LA Ultra Lounge, right next to a Hooters, across the from the Los Angeles Convention Center, Samsung, like everyone else, isn't showing off anything new. But the particular bobble they have that catches my eye is the Samsung 830 series solid-state drive, released back in October of 2011. It is a sleek little gun-metal black drive thinner than 1/5 of an inch and no weight to it whatsoever. The case is a gun metal brushed aluminum with only the silver raised logo of Samsung emblazoned on it.

This is when I strike it up with Chris Geiser, senior product management at Samsung. Geiser is passionate about the product. He lets it drop that, "Samsung is now spendings $12 billion a year on memory research". Every SDD samsung makes is 100-percent Samsung made parts, from the NAND storage memory to the controller.

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Condusiv Technologies has released Diskeeper 12, the latest edition of its powerful and professional defrag tool. Improvements this time include an optimised HyperBoot engine, which aims to further improve your system boot times. Diskeeper’s HyperFast technology now supports TRIM to maximize Solid State Drive performance.

A handy set of monitoring tools collect data on your I/O usage and Diskeeper effectiveness, and track your drive’s key SMART attributes, enabling the program to alert you to possible signs of impending hardware failure.

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Enterprise cloud-based file sharing service Box strengthened its offering on Thursday, announcing new features that will simplify management for IT administrators. The new functionality allows for greater control over security, and the ability to enable enterprise-wide search.

The company also debuted new pricing structures that enable larger companies to adopt its services with more predictable pricing. This is a move away from the traditional per-seat model of the past, and makes cloud storage more cost-effective for large enterprises.

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American storage company Seagate announced on Wednesday its intention to become majority owner of French storage company LaCie by buying 64.5% of the company's shares from chairman and CEO Phillippe Spruch. Pending government approval of this transaction, Seagate will then buy up the rest of the outstanding stock in cash or commence a squeeze out maneuver of any minority stakeholders.

After he sells his stake, Spruch will become the head of Seagate's consumer storage products organization, above Patrick Connolly, who is currently Seagate's vice president and general manager of retail. Deputy general manager of LaCie Pierre van der Elst will also join the Seagate team. The financial terms of the new position for LaCie's CEO have not yet been determined.

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When you need to carry sensitive data on a USB key then it’s easy to find an encryption tool which will help to keep it safe. But life gets a little more complicated when you need to transfer your files from a PC to a Mac, or maybe a Linux system: now you’ll need a cross-platform solution, and we have the perfect candidate in mind.

Encryption Wizard is an easy-to-use, yet surprisingly powerful Java-based encryption tool. Developed by the US military (a plus point or a problem, depending on your point of view) but available for all, the program provides a straightforward way to protect confidential files on USB keys (or anywhere else, really).

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If you're worried about data loss, turn to the cloud. That's what a new survey commissioned by CA suggests. Fifty-five percent of all US businesses expect usage of the cloud to increase to meet continuity objectives. That's an important statistic considering every one of the 300 businesses participating in the study experienced some type of data loss event in the past year.

Among the most common reasons for data loss are IT system failures (76 percent); human error (41 percent); and external threats and attacks (35 percent). An earlier CA study suggests that data loss events cost companies an average $160,000 every year.

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